Roy Huggins Says Stuff

Here’s something nice for y’all:

The custodians of five New York pension funds, being Google shareholders, ask for the company to make policies to counteract censorship in nations such as China and Iran among many others.

I think I was talking to someone this past weekend about Google’s move away from their pre-IPO corporate tenet of “Don’t Be Evil.” After going public, they struck that phrase from their mission statement. It seemed rather telling of the ways in which being beholden to stock holders can turn a good company bad. Google ostensibly could no longer have a phrase like “Don’t Be Evil” as a guiding principle because… I don’t really know why. The SEC would get upset? A stockholder would be offended? I’m not really sure.

But this is one of those stories that gives me a glimmer of hope. As the first poster¹ on this article points out, the fund performing this request holds somewhere around 0.15% of Google’s stock. That is nowhere near being a significant voting block. But it’s great to see that at least one relatively large holder is interested in using it as something more than just an income generator. If Google can no longer promise to not be evil because their shareholders may or may not desire evil, I’m glad that at least one of the few that feels differently is using their voice to express an interest in the public good.

1. http://youtube.com/watch?v=ciG-Xs7mBwU [↩]

So I just installed Wordpress here, replacing my old professional website with a good ol’ basic blog.

For you few non-Webbies who may be reading this, what I mean to say is “Techy-tech-tech talk”.

For the rest of you: Wordpress has a neat feature in its Dashboard admin page that gives you a direct feed of all your site’s incoming links as recorded by Technorati. When I opened it up for the first time, I found to my delighted surprise that a bunch of different people have been linking to this site for as long as 400 days or more. That’s right, 400 whole days!

Turns out they’ve all got one of my old Blog Your Own Adventure promotional quiz memes still sitting in their archives. And guess what, they all liked it! I really should have been looking at Technorati a year ago. I might have spent more time working to improve BYOA.

So it got me thinking… maybe if I can build up BYOA, I can be bought out by Google! Google has yet to acquire a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style collaborative storytelling system, right? Wouldn’t they want one that even works with the “Blogosphere”!? I know I would if I were Google. I’d be on that like porn on YouTube. Or trolls on Daily Kos. Or something else on some other site that it’d be useful to associate myself with.

But no big, important company is going to initiate a buyout of someone who doesn’t look serious. And what do you need to look serious? A business plan, of course.

So here I am officially posting my business plan for the Blog Your Own Adventure Web 2.0 Enterprise Blogosphere Synergy Project:

1. Build BYOA
2. Wait Around
3. Get Bought by Google!

It’s a twist on the old Web 1.0 business plan template. And that template is proven to work. Therefore, my business plan has a solid, empirical basis. It can’t go wrong.

Right, Google? Yep, I thought so.